The Gospel According to St Matthew (1964)

February 18, 1966

Screen:The Life of Jesus:Pasolini's Film Opens at the Fine Arts

By BOSLEY CROWTHER

Published: February 18, 1966

EVER since the Venice Film Festival in 1964, we'd been hearing exciting information about an Italian film shown and honored there. It was Pier Paolo Pasolini's "Il Vangelo Secondo Matteo" ("The Gospel According to St. Matthew"), which, according to the reports, was a strikingly unusual picturing of the story of Jesus, done with a cast of nonprofessionals on locations in southern Italy and directed by a man who was an acknowledged Marxist and atheist.

The prospect of it was fascinating. What sort of film could it be? What sort of interpretation of Jesus and the disciples would it present? What contrasts with the all-too-familiar type of Hollywood Biblical film would it afford?

The answers are here now. The picture opened at the Fine Arts last night (with the premiere showing for the benefit of the Msgr. William R. Kelly School), and it turns out to be more exciting than even the first flash reports on it were and more rewarding in its surge of human drama and spiritual power than one had hoped it might be.

For this time the story of Jesus is told in the simple and naturalistic terms of a plain, humble man of the people conducting a spiritual salvation campaign in an environment and among a population that are rough, unadorned and real.

The Jesus we see is no transcendent evangelist in shining white robes, performing his ministrations and miracles in awesome spectacles. He is a young man of spare appearance, garbed in dingy, homespun cloaks, moving with quiet resolution across a rugged and dusty countryside, gathering his tough-faced disciples from toilers he meets along the way and preaching his words of exhortation to crowds of simple, sullen peasants and sprawling children.

His words are the straight words of the Gospel, spoken in flinty, barren scenes wherein the camera of Mr. Pasolini ranges from the speaker's fervent face to the rude, open faces of listeners to their spare stone houses beyond. The viewer, taking in these freighted gatherings, has the mystical sense of being there.

Likewise, the cryptic performances of the miracles—the healing of a hideously grotesque leper, the feeding of the multitudes, the walking on water and others—are pictorially done so that they seem the simple, straight, quick-change recordings of inexplicable phenomena.

It is an extraordinary blending of black-and-white reality and the literalness of St. Matthew's Gospel that Mr. Pasolini has here. And the aspects of all the familiar happenings have a form and naturalness that are profound. The angel's annunciation to Joseph of Mary's impending grace, the visit of the Wise Men to the baby, the flight into Egypt, the carrying out of the slaughter of infants on Herod's orders—such things appear all too real, as do the literal brutality of the Crucifixion and the grief-hushed removal of Jesus' body from the Cross.

It is neither transcendent nor mundane, neither extravagant nor banal. There is a gathering of humanity and plausibility in Mr. Pasolini's film. And the natural development in Jesus is that of an ardent man who grows more inflamed and impatient as he proceeds with his ordained ministry, until his spirit and bearing are fiery when he cries woe to the scribes and Pharisees and he looks upon his delinquent disciples in Gethsemane with deep and curling hurt.

The consequence is a crescendo of excitement and involvement with the fervor and passion of Jesus and an accumulating sense of the irony and tragedy of Jesus' suffering, in historical as well as spiritual terms. The remarkable avoidance of clichés on Mr. Pasolini's part — the simple staging of the Last Supper, for instance, as a gathering of a tired, disquieted group; the omission of the sound effect of a cock's crow after Peter's third denial—helps to achieve a fresh illusion of the unfolding of an ancient tragedy, or at least the illusion of the performance of a most reverent and sincere Passion Play.

It is impossible to give full credit to all the earnest performers, so many are they. But the Jesus of Enrique Irazoqui, a Spanish student who was visiting in Rome, is an unforgettable portrayal of fervor and sensitivity. Settimo Di Porto's Peter is a fine, solid, foursquare man and Mario Socrate's John the Baptist is a subdued firebrand in a poet's angular frame. Otello Sestili's Judas, Paola Tedesco's schoolgirl Salome and Susanna Pasolini's older Mary, as well as Margherita Caruso's Mary in her youth, are performances by unskilled actors that will engrave themselves on your mind.

The musical score is surprising. It has a distinct eclectic range from Bach's St. Matthew's Passion to "Missa Luba," a Congolese mass sung to African intruments and rhythms. To hear, for instance, Odetta sing the famous American Negro spiritual "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child" behind scenes of Mary and the baby, or the rousing "Alexander Nevesky Cantata" of Prokofiev behind Herod's slaughter of the infants and the scene of Jesus' removal to Golgotha may startle and disturb the placid ear. But these are just further surprises in a most uncommon film.